Quite Intriguing. What I'm learning.

Alan Bennett was an English author and playwright. He was born in 1934. He has written quite a few
plays, books, TV shows, radio shows and films. Talking Heads was a stage and TV show he wrote,
which was a montage of monologues, so to speak. There are two seasons to it, each with six episodes,
and a thirteenth play. There are recurring themes in Talking Heads, such as loneliness, romance and
irony. The individual episodes were one long monologue with a chracter talking about something -
it could be anything, but most probably about something that has happened to them.

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter is an English playwright. Harold was born in working-class Hackney in London,
and both of his parents were Jewish. He started writing plays in 1957. The play in which we,
the drama class first heard about him was The Dumb Waiter, in which Umair and James
played Ben and Gus, two hitmen in a basement hotel room with a dumb waiter.
The Dumb Waiter has an excellent example of Harold Pinter's famous pause - the
Pinter Pause. The Pinter Pause is a long period of silence at the beginning of a play - in a
script it is a whole page or even more of stage directions and actors acting without speech.
It sets the scene and gives a level of curiousity amongst the audience, alienating them
somewaht when it comes to showtime - The alienation effect, or the 'V' effect. It draws in the
audience and makes it 'special' when the character squeezes out their first lines. In the
Dumb Waiter, the Pinter Pause is taken into effect when Gus finds a matchbox in his shoe,
and a crushed cigarette packet in the other. It shows what what the characters are like before
the audience get to hear them. We learn in the Pinter Pause in The Dumb Waiter that Gus is
not the brightest tool in the box, and Ben is a serious guy.